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Daniel Blaufuks

Biography

Daniel Blaufuks (b. 1963) uses mainly photography and video, presenting his work through books, installations and films. He has a predilection for issues such as the connection between time and space and the representation of private and public memory.

Blaufuks work explores the processes of memory – how we construct meaning in our lives through the accrual of details and traces, from the mental residue and after-images of our daily existence. Blaufuks is interested not only in the ways that photography and film are changing as media, but also in the methods by which we archive, store and retrieve information – our ability to remember.

Portfolio

Utz

"The works in this exhibition pursue two mutually interdependent lines of investigation: one is
the obsolescent and the other is auratic. At once fascinated and troubled by the disappearance of analogue
photo technologies, Blaufuks revisits them at different stages throughout the historical evolution of
photography, in order to determine to what extent they now possess, if any, aura– and those things that
underpin it, i.e., authenticity. While referencing a whole host of historic and modernist figures from
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, the 18th century Frenchman credited with the production of the first photograph, to
Man Ray, the technologies used by Blaufuks range from the cyanotype to polaroid as well as video, some of
which are bona fide, such as his use of old polaroid stock, while others are patently counterfeit, such as
his variously manipulated cyanotype (here provocatively denatured into outsized digital prints). In more or
less every instance, the goal revolves around specific questions of aura and obsolescence. For in the
artist’s estimation of things, it could almost be read as a kind of equation: the existence of aura is
virtually proportionate to how obsolete the technology is. I say virtually because this is as much a
hypothesis as it is an assertion. One intuits that Blaufuks acts almost like a scientist here – granted a
scientist with a conspicuous agenda, but one who is sufficiently disinterested to allow that agenda to be
challenged by the results of his research."

Chris Sharp

Portfolio

Terezin

Terezín (or Theresienstadt) is to the north of Prague, in the Czech Republic. It is a fortress
which in 1942 was declared by the Germans as a “model ghetto” at the Wannsee Conference. It was controlled
by a Jewish council, and it housed a grea tnumber of teachers, artists and writers. There are evens signed
that there was intense cultural activity. As one of the prisoners wrote, “Life could seem almostnormal
here”. But the truth is that Terezín was just one of several concentration camps en route to Auschwitz or
Birkenau.

In 2007, Daniel Blaufuks travelled to Terezín, his curiosity sparked by a
photograph found almost at the end of the book Austerlitz by the German author W. G. Sebald. It is the
picture of a room with shelf-lined walls, with two tables,several chairs and a clock, showing six o’clock.
Blaufuks found this room, which since then has been used for other purposes and no longer has the clock.
Subconsciously, Blaufuks took a similar photograph to the one in Sebald’s book,which marked the start of his
project Terezín: a work about the possibility (the need) to make a mental and critical revisiting of a place
and a story, in a format including photographs, videos and a book.

Portfolio

The Business of Living

The Business of Living is a work, inspired by the diaries of Cesare Pavese,
about the experience of time and the reminiscence that stays from the passing days. To live like one does a
task, like something that needs its own proper order, as if it was something one has to do in some office,
and the necessity, often mechanic and bureaucratic, of ordering time: to wake up, to eat, to think, to do,
to work, to sleep, to live. Yesterday, today, tomorrow.

This series of works, presented in
different sizes, are fragments chosen from a past life and of a space of complex time for the author. The
series is composed by simple photographic works, almost “tableaus” on the banality of the daily, staged for
this work in closed spaces and with very little or no connection to the outside world. They are pieces
turned towards itself, as if part of a diary of a time that seems to be endless. The photographs, with a
very strong symbolic language, that apparently seems to tell little or nothing at all, recall not only our
personal memory, but also representations present in Painting and Cinema, and which are therefore part of
the memory shared by our civilization.

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